View full sizePhoto courtesy of Russell Senior/Personal Teleco ProjectMetroFi's equipment once dotted traffic signals and lampposts around the city. Now, Personal Telco Project volunteers are putting some of the old hardware to work in North Portland.

Portland's failed experiment in free Wi-Fi may yet bear fruit, albeit on a very modest scale.

Volunteers with the Personal Telco Project have salvaged one of the wireless devices from the city's defunct wireless project and installed it this month at a home near Arbor Lodge Park in North Portland.

Russell Senior, Personal Telco's president, said his group hasn't run a full battery of tests on their installation. But Senior said the device is functioning, and he estimates it's providing free Wi-Fi within a radius of about 300 feet.

The city turned over about 100 of the wireless devices to Personal Telco, along with several of the "gateways" necessary to connect them. Senior said his group may repurpose more of the devices at Arbor Lodge, and more elsewhere in the city if donors provide the underlying Internet connections for the equipment to rebroadcast.

What did Wi-Fi cost?

Contractor MetroFi said it spent between $2 million and $3 million in private funds building Portland's free Wi-Fi network.

Portland spent about $267,000 in taxpayer funds to research and commission the network, then allocated about $66,000 to take down the network. That expense was partially offset by a $30,000 MetroFi bond established up front to cover network removal costs in case the company became insolvent (which it ultimately did).

Portland hired a Silicon Valley startup called MetroFi in 2006 to install hundreds of Wi-Fi antennas around the city. The company's investors paid the bill, which MetroFi pegged between $2 million and $3 million, hoping to profit by selling advertising on the network.

But connection quality was erratic, and Internet advertising couldn't support the cost of installing and maintaining the network. So MetroFi shut it down and dissolved the company in 2008, leaving Portland with several hundred derelict devices scattered around the city.

The city took some equipment down itself, and hired contractors to remove the rest. Most are gone now, but a few remain -- looking increasingly shaky on lampposts and traffic signals.

Personal Telco studied the devices that Portland donated to the group before identifying a project where they could be put to use.

Integra Telecom donated the Internet connection that powers the free Wi-Fi on the Arbor Lodge device. There's nothing unique about MetroFi's old gear, Senior said, except that MetroFi has it readily available.

Whatever happened to..

Remember Chuck Haas, MetroFi's CEO? He dropped off the radar when his company shut down, and he stopped returning my calls about the disposition of the equipment MetroFi abandoned in Portland. Haas now has a LinkedIn page, which identifies his current occupation as "Living the Gospel" in "Non-Profit Organization Management."

Before starting MetroFi, Haas had been co-founder of Covad Communications and a manager at Intel.

"We could have done this without MetroFi's equipment, but we could not have done it without someone providing the internet bandwidth to share," Senior said.

"We are ready to do this elsewhere in Portland as well," he said, "but doing so is contingent on having a partner to provide the bandwidth. We are very open and eager to hear from people willing to partner with us."